“End everything”?!
This is literally the fastest I think I’ve ever gone from inspiration to creation. It’s 7:00 am and I’m watching a little Netflix before the day starts. Well, I was until just a minute ago when I started writing this. Now I’m writing this. Love being meta 😉😄
I was watching a 3-part series about a surgeon who was found out for narcissism and falsifying research. In the second installment, which I’m almost at the end of, we see the initial efforts of the team investigating the doctor and the machinations of the powerful hospital that is incentivized to discredit them and maintain the reputation of the manipulative surgeon. In a conventional 3-act structure the second act puts the protagonists in, to quote George Lucas, “the biggest hole in which they can possibly find themselves”. We know it’s not the end, but we can’t imagine how the tide will turn toward the forces of good.
One of the investigators, about 10 minutes before the end of the roughly hour-long second episode, describes the despair he was feeling at the time. He says “I thought of ending everything”.
We know that’s a euphemism for suicide, but it caught my ear in a funny way. Maybe it’s because I’ve been thinking so much about metaphysics lately, largely in preparation for this presentation. And it probably is. But isn’t that a funny expression? Think about it. It’s so absurdly solipsistic. And such a cry of pain. Suicide ends certain things, but not all things. And yet it’s such a cry of pain to seek such oblivion. “Everything” can feel really bad sometimes, which is why we have such thoughts in the first place. It’s okay if you do. Many people do, and you should get help if you feel it persistently.
But some paths, some very important paths, perhaps feature that impulse more than others. Had that investigator pursued a path of less consequence he likely would not have had that experience. But this work involved the prevention of real human suffering, the pursuit of true flourishing. The Universe counts on us to pursue such paths, while simultaneously arraying forces to counter these very endeavors. How strange!
Maybe when we say “end everything” we are tacitly implying a metaphysic in which we acknowledge that “everything” needs the high level of awareness humans bring, that the whole system indeed improves itself with the data that our sophisticated and unprecedented human faculties provide. And that it’s an imperfect, contradictory, competitive process with all humans jostling against one another, seeking to maximize valuation only as far as their/our limited sight can perceive. And for this reason we need all of us, because no one else has the perspective that you offer. And other parts of the universe conspire to stop you.
How strange.
I think about God, or at least the various concepts people offer. It’s hard not to. I’m a theologian at heart.
Here are two opposing statements that are both heretical, and yet the synthesis of their contradiction seems to be true.
God needs you
God doesn’t need you
God needs you. No, God doesn’t. God is perfect and self-sufficient.
God doesn’t need you. Well, then why would God have created you?
God concepts are absurd, always rife with such contradictions as we imagine the deity within the same metaphysical soup in which we simmer (as Socrates and Plato knew), and yet they are often the best tools we have to bridge the gap we feel between existence and purpose. Just don’t expect them to make sense, unless you learn to think like Hegel.
God doesn’t need you. Existence was working itself out before you came.
God needs you. And now that you’re here the rest of society relies on the perspective that only you can offer.
So, what is God? Part of existence or not? A force that drives existence? All are heretical and/or absurd.
But there is everything, all that exists, and when we talk about suicide euphamistically we seem to acknowledge the necessity of our perspective within this, because it feels like ending everything, and in a way, it is. Cutting one pair of eyes off of the great beast so that it must rely on others, but impoverished for the precious and irreplaceable point of view it now lacks.
You matter. And sometimes it’s hard. Existence aligns some of its forces against purpose, but conscripts others to your aid. That’s my experience, anyway. And that means you’re on the right track. Because Act 3 is coming, in the great drama of God, existence, what have you, and to you it may as well be everything.
It’s now 7:30. Time for the last 10 minutes of the show, and then on to the rest of the day. Have a good one, and remember your crucial place in everything!